Sarah Palin a "Great" President

John McCain made a speech this weekend in which he said how much he admired Sarah Palin and that she would make a "great president." Just to think: how close we came to electing a man with such demonstrably poor judgment. My only reaction is a huge sense of relief.

NY Times columnist Frank Rich detailed on Sunday how McCain "has made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11" and that's no hyperbole.

Here's a brief excerpt from a longer article:

"It’s not just that [McCain] he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

"What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.
Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

There's a lot more at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/opinion/11rich.html?em.

Although Rich doesn't mention it (there's so much to be said), I would to his litany the prominent role that Reagan Ideology played in bringing about our current financial crisis.

The ideology and politicians of the Republican Right have done this country irreparable harm. It's hard to understand why the Right holds on to any support at all.

How much freedom should kids have?

My oldest grandson is 10-years-old. I recently mentioned to his mother (my daughter) who lives in Denver, that "if Blake visited me" in San Diego, I would "certainly" allow him go down to the beach by himself (not to swim). The beach is about a quarter mile away.

True, there is one moderately busy street to cross, La Jolla Boulevard. But with a wide center divider and frequent two-minute gaps in the traffic, any 10-year-old with even a mild interest in self-preservation would have no trouble making the crossing.

"No way," Amy reacted summarily when I mentioned letting Blake trek to the beach by himself. Later, when I told my son what his sister had said, he agreed with her without hesitation, to my surprise. He pointed out that "all parents" of his generation would feel the same way -- which only proves that parental protectiveness is even more endemic than I thought it was.

My first reaction to Bill: "There were no such restrictions on your feeedom when you were 10. Why was it okay then and not okay now?"

The standard answer seems to be: It's "more dangerous now" than it was then. Child abductors! Weird characters! Homeless!. All of which existed when I was a kid, but without the parental paranoia.

Fact is, there's no evidence whatsoever to support "more dangerous" and the incidences of "child abduction by a stranger" remains too small to measure. If you wanted your child to be abducted, according to the book "Free Range Kids," you would have to leave him/her out for 775,000 years before it happened.

More traffic? True. But intuition tells me that the "traffic" excuse is, more than anything, a convenient rationalization. The real problem is "fear," not only of harm coming to your child, but fear of what the neighbors will say.

Thinking back on my childhood in a quiet area of New York City, I literally had the run of the neighborhood by age 8. I could go as far as my bike would take me. My parents never asked where I'd been and only occasionally "what I'd done today." The answer was always, "out playing." By 8 I had permission to cross a street busier than La Jolla Boulevard -- "if I was careful to look both ways," which I always did because I did not wish to be hit by a car! From age 5 on I walked to school rain or shine everyday by myself -- three blocks and two streets to cross.

I care every bit as much about my grandchildren's welfare as their parents do. That is is why I'm concerned that our culture of sheltering and protecting children may have more downside than upside.

The link below by the author "Free Range Kids" provides additional perspective on the issue. Please check it out. It's good stuff.


http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-the-subway-alone/